


bank us your soul

by notadoombot (CaptainClintSpiderBalder)



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Fix-It, M/M, Post-Season/Series 04, shameless ripping off of greek mythology, spoilers for the finale that must not be named
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-25 15:32:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18577348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainClintSpiderBalder/pseuds/notadoombot
Summary: Eliot goes on a boating quest, ruins a coat.





	bank us your soul

**Author's Note:**

> This is something that got stuck in my mind. In the end it turned out I had a lot more thoughts about Eliot than I expected and they all seemed to end up here. So this is a shameless use of Greek imaginery, a calming balm for me and another way to avoid work. 
> 
> English is not my native tongue, so even though I double checked I apologise for any spelling errors or inconsistencies that might slip due to the ungodly hour I'm posting this in.

About twenty feet away from where the boat drops him off there’s a rocky corner that’s just the right shade of dark, cold, fucking _dripping_ with sadness, and Eliot wonders, not for the first time in the past few days, if he is the right person for this job.

When he was a kid, he used to avoid the pond near the farm. At least until Dirty Dancing was a thing in his life, and then he got to avoid it for a whole other reason. When he was little, scrawny, too tall and gangly and didn’t quite understand what it was that he hated so much about himself, he thought about that pond in the dark and the splashing sound his boots made at the edge of the road. It always seemed too big and ready to swallow him whole, it made him shiver all the way back home, thinking about the clouds over the water and that murky shade of green right before dusk. It’s different here, because the air– The air does smell like it did in Indiana, but the cold feels different, like a wet blanket that’s been wrapped around his muscles. Both his feet sink in what should be mud, but is something thick and black instead.

He brought this to life, he thinks. He suspects. Alice held his hand before going down, and he thought briefly _it should be you_. Because she is better, because she loved Quentin better– Best. But he is also selfish and willing to prove himself wrong, so when she said “just focus, don’t let that place fool you, it’s designed to punish”, he replied “well, who doesn’t enjoy a bit of punishment every once in a while”. So yes, of course. He squeezed the coins she put in his hand for the two–way trip. “Don’t fuck it up, El.” She was playful, but stern. There was a tiny speck of very-much-earned doubt in her voice.

He keeps walking through the water, leaving behind the dim light of the boat, and shudders at the touch of whatever’s lurking beneath the surface. Whatever he thought would grab him when he was a kid, get him to drown, drown, drown. Is that what Quentin felt, that siren song.

“Get a fucking grip,” he scolds himself. His voice carries around and circles back to him. He gets colder and slower as he approaches the rocks.

There, crouched among the rocks and face hidden underneath the long hair, Quentin shivers and breathes too fast, too loud. For a second it doesn’t matter what’s in the water, the cold doesn’t get in, because there is only the loud anticipation of Quentin _breathing_ , just a few inches shy of his hands and Eliot dying, _dying_ to just– reach– out–

He swallows. Maybe he brought this to life, too.

He lets that thought pass as he gets on one knee, and isn’t this what he always does with Quentin. Constantly bowing, constantly kneeling, except when it counts. But this does count. _Has_ to count.

“Q?” it does take him a few seconds to get his voice out, but when he does it doesn’t tremble. He is a goddamn king, he will behave as such. And he will slay the dragon, save the knight, fucking make them a margarita when this is over. He lifts his hand to Quentin’s cheek and moves away a few strands of dark hair. “Hair _does_ grow after death,” he scoffs and Quentin shakes his head briefly. “So,” he lets his hand fall to Quentin’s neck, “what’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?”

After weeks of sailing and searching, Quentin feels unreal. Tepid and not entirely solid, like he could just slip through his fingers any second now.

There’s a mumbled “running” that leaves his mouth, if he is surprised to see Eliot, his face certainly doesn’t show it. Eliot lets his thumb wander near Quentin’s throat, he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing as he slides his fingers through the hair on the nape of his neck, as he has done so many times before.

Eliot’s knees sink in the water and something brushes past his right thigh, it feels suspiciously like a hand, grabbing at him, tugging at his coat. He avoids thinking about that, just leans in closer to Quentin and breathes in.

“That’s good,” he answers. “That’s–” his voice breaks and he has to close his eyes for a second. Alice’s voice in his mind reminds him again, _focus_ and _don’t fuck this up, Waugh_. “Q,” this time Quentin lifts his head and stares at him, he feels small and defeated and wants to kiss him so badly it hurts. Instead he goes on, “I need you to do something for me.”

While Quentin grew up on fantasy novels, Eliot grew up sneaking into his crappy town’s movie theatre with Taylor and living vicariously through a few hundred hours of romantic comedies from the eighties and the nineties. He is, for all intents and purposes, a sap. One of the first things he gave away when designing this new identity, this new Eliot that left the farm and his family. He hid away the warmth, and the losses, the bruises he got from everyone and everything around him, and he constructed a new and improved Eliot, much less keen on letting himself hope for everything he grew up soaking in. But still, there’s not a nerve in his body that’s not expecting Quentin’s face to light up and say _whatever you need_ , and that will be that. That will be the happy ending, followed by a much needed fade to black in his chambers at Whitespire.

Quentin does close his eyes at that, tired in a very much Quentin-like fashion, the kind he got near midterms at two o’clock in the morning, just the two of them finishing a bottle of wine at the cottage. Young, and lost, and tired Quentin Coldwater.

“I just– I keep trying to run,” he says.

So Eliot tucks his hair behind his ears, he rests his forehead against Quentin’s. “I know,” a part of him, the one that lived through fifty years of self-complacent happiness, has a _sweetheart_ on the tip of his tongue. _I know, darling_ , jokingly at first, easy and comfortable by the time they knew they were in it for good. He settles for: “I know, Q. It’s been hell to find you.”

It had been months until Penny had come to them, but time works different in the Underworld, or so they say. So it had been months for Eliot, who was learning to breathe again, live inside his skin again. His body –not Eliot, although the same could be said for him for a long time– reached for Quentin by default. Whenever he thought about it, thought about all the time he spent trapped while that thing wore his face and learned to reach for Q until it became second nature, his throat closed up. He didn’t even have a body to mourn, and yet the void that Quentin left ached in a very physical sense, so how was that fair.

And then, Penny had come to them.

_I’m telling you this because_ – he said, suited up, composed, very un-Penny like. _Look, I guess I sort of care for the nerd, so, whatever. You deserve to know, at least._ And Julia had been fucking furious against the cold, calculated stare of Alice, who simply said: “what do you mean he’s lost?”

Eliot takes a deep breath.

“Q, look at me.” This close, he can imagine Quentin’s heartbeat, hasty and uneven, so he holds on to him. “Listen, listen,” he licks his lips and forces himself to move back a few inches, enough to look him in the eye. “I need you to do something for me. I need you to come back, okay? I  
need you–” isn’t that the truth, isn’t that enough.

Julia had been furious she couldn’t do this, not after Persephone. “Hades’ not that bad, but he does hold a grudge, no way Charon’s letting you in.” So it had to be Alice, it had to be. And she just stared at Eliot, so quiet and for so long.

“I need you to come back with me,” he finishes, desperately. He had wanted so badly to be Eliot, the Spectacular, but he was just Eliot, the Desperate; Eliot, the Fuck Up; Eliot, the Always Fucking Late.

Quentin sits back against the rocks. His face looks almost white but no colour seems right in here, he looks like he’s caught between two places, none of them real enough. He sounds afraid when he starts talking, he answers “I don’t…” before breaking off. His lower lip quivers but he manages to contain whatever emotion was threatening to spill. “I think I fucked up, El.”

His hands tense at the mention of his name. How long has it been, a year? “Hey,” he flattens the wrinkles in Quentin’s t-shirt as best as he can, “you’re talking to the king of fucking up, here, I’d tell you if that were the case.” Quentin avoids his glance when he laughs, so Eliot continues. “And you know I don’t go easy on you.”

And that is true, he can be a bastard. He’s never gone easy on Quentin, even with his soft spot. He’s been mean, and stupid, and cruel. He’s never been that honest. In this life, at least.

“You don’t.”  
“I don’t,” he whispers. He grabs the fabric of Quentin’s t-shirt and it wrinkles again; ghost clothes, unreliable. That will be the first stop when they get out: new clothes, new look, new life. “Listen, we only get one shot at this and we don’t have a lot of time, so– So this is important. This is a choice, right here.”

Eliot’s romantic comedy is like this: there’s this boy, and he’s soft-hearted but mean in the right ways, he keeps up with Eliot (which is a first), he sneaks into his life and Eliot falls, and he falls hard. He’ll shoot a monster in the face, and he’ll walk through Hades if he has to, to get him back. Which is why Alice corners him and asks him, not for the first time: “do you love him?” And Eliot first laughs, and his stomach _still fucking hurts_ even though the wound is not there anymore. He’s already admitted to this, they’ve already done the Big Feelings Talk, now that Quentin’s not here, what does it matter. But this is different, because what she’s asking is _do you have what it takes_ , and boy, Eliot wants to cry and say _I obviously do not_. But then again, he shot a monster in the face, he brought Hell on Earth, and he promised himself he’d be brave, so what he does is think _chin up, kid_ in his best Margo voice and say “of course I do”. Isn’t that _funny_.

“Do you know where you are?”

With the question Quentin goes limp against the rock, defeated in a way he can recognize, while he presses his hands against his face. “I, uh– was supposed to go somewhere else,” he confesses, in the same hushed tone he got when Eliot caught him high that one time.

“That’s correct,” Eliot lets out a small laugh. “You’ve been driving Penny crazy. Original flavor, not diet.”  
“He was– surprisingly nice to me.”  
“I hear that’s what happens when you die,” which is apparently the wrong thing to say, given the stare he gets from Quentin, just arching his eyebrows at him. The gesture brings out a smile in Eliot, small at first and then so wide, because this is Quentin, who he only got to see for one second before everything went to shit. Quentin and he is real, _here_ ; Quentin angry at him, not alive yet, but not gone. And even pale and confused, he would kill for this boy. “So why did you run.”

There’s a beat before Quentin answers.

“I’m not sure.”

Which is– Heartbreaking, to be honest. Because this is the point where he’s supposed to realize that yes, he did run. No, he did not want to be dead. Yes, this is what I want to choose, I want to run, I want to escape. Eliot’s good at persuasion, but he’s not good at reminding people about  
the good things in life, he has enough trouble remembering those himself. And he’s not allowed to, here. Legally. Penny pulled out a contract. Which was– _anticlimactic_ , not the most epic resolution at all.

The water stirs. He does not want to think about the boat taking off without them, and he does not want to think about the pond near his farm and all the hands dragging him down until he slowly suffocates, not alive, but not gone either. Then again, there are worse fates.

_I need you to be sure_ , he wants to say. What escapes his lips instead is: “I miss you.” _Focus._ “And this– This is sort of a crossroads, Q. So I need you to think really, really hard about why you ran away.”

The way Alice and Julia had explained it him, and they had discussed this during a really long night in a moderate state of sobriety, the Acheron is not a fixed place. Not on this plane or the Underworld, it just… drifts. And that’s what Quentin is. Drifting.

“So he needs an anchor.” Which makes sense, because Eliot is used to dragging people down.  
“A reminder,” Julia corrected. She was tipsy and her fingers moved quickly through here hair, braiding and unbraiding and braiding again, as if she didn’t know what to do with it or with herself. “ _If_ he wants to come back.”

That was the deal, that’s what Penny had promised them. And he’d been the lucky one to land the job.

Quentin shakes his head. Everything seems foggy, displaced. Even Eliot can feel it, can feel _him_ scattering. He sneers with the same detached notion Eliot had learned so early to identify, when it was just the two of them. “I’m just so– I’m just so tired, El.”

Alice had been wrong about one thing though, the Acheron was not a place of punishment, it merely felt like it. It felt like old magic and created itself around you, drew from the corners of your mind. A place of healing, if you let it. The problem was, the people who drifted here? Healing was not something they recognised. Eliot could sense it in his bones from the first moment he stepped into that boat, like a dull ache.

He reaches for him for the first time, grabs his hand and for a moment Eliot is at a loss. He watches him play with his ring and avoid his gaze, as if he’s saying _don’t you understand?_

“I know,” he does. There is a constant fatigue to living, it tugs at the seams of every single day of his life, and Eliot has gotten so, so good at ignoring that. “I know,” he repeats, steadier this time. He chooses his next words carefully. “That’s never stopped you.”

Quentin presses his lips together, his hand starts to slip so Eliot keeps it in place. He grabs his wrist and hopes it feels warmer that it does for him. “There’s not been a single day that I’ve known you when you haven’t been brave, Q, so I need you to choose that today.” Quentin chuckles at that, Eliot sits right beside him. The water’s up to his waist now, his coat and his shirt are ruined, so much for a fabulous rescue mission.

“I don’t…” their fingers are intertwined and he refuses to let go, where would that leave him then, an idiot with a boat. “Why?” They’re close enough that Eliot can feel every shiver, every shaky breath, and in turn he assumes, Quentin can feel the way he vibrates when he laughs.  
“Come on,” the smile on his face is rough, he’s sure of it. “Come on, don’t make me…”  
“What.”

His chest is constrained and he turns his head away, his next breath feels more like gasping for air.

Alice voice is in his head again. _Do you love him_ , with so much intent. Yes, of course, enough to rip the Earth apart. Everyone knows that. That’s why he got lucky. Because he is a sap, and because right now his love is primal and raw and the only thing that’s barely held him together. So, yes, yes, _of course I do_.

“I’ve never understood–” not the best start. “You have a habit of seeing the good in all those parts of me that I fucking despise. You’ve seen me– all of me, the good, the bad, the fucking disgraceful”, he means to say that last part lightly, instead he takes a moment to swallow. “And it terrified me, because you just– You always do that, you just jump in blindly and hope for the best, and Q, that’s definitely not me. So yeah, I couldn’t trust that. Didn’t want to. Be whole, maybe. With you. Not without ruining it. But I don’t fucking care about that, because what’s left to ruin?” The water is still for now. He doesn’t lift his head and his throat feels dry. “So does that– Does that answer your question.”

He wants to yell at himself. Is this what being brave feels like? Hollow and cold? Then again, Quentin’s always felt a little bit like leaping with no safety net and a little bit like home.

When he finally turns to Quentin, he feels completely drained. And Quentin stares at him for a few seconds and quietly says “I miss you”, which is– Okay, which is underwhelming, but that’s okay. It still makes him feel like something’s clawing at his chest, so that’s okay. He sighs and adds, “I miss… I miss them. I miss you.”

He is so small, Eliot thinks he could probably pick him up and carry him all the way back to the land of the living, if he wasn’t binded by contract. What he does instead is let go of his hand and pass an arm over his shoulders. As if he’d turned on a switch, Quentin's whole posture dissolves, he melts against him. No tension, no nothing. He softly kisses his temple, just because he’s there and he can.

He almost misses his next words, buried in Quentin’s hair and remembering how to breathe. “Can we go home?”

Eliot exhales, eyes closed. He was gripping Quentin’s arm so tightly there was no way he wasn’t hurting him and now he doesn’t know how to untangle that, is not even sure how he’s gonna get his legs to cooperate. “Sure, why not” he means to sound nonchalant. “I was looking forward to going on a boating quest with you, anyway.”


End file.
